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Karen Silkwood
Karen Gay Silkwood was a chemical technician and trade union activist known for raising concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety in a nuclear facility. After testifying to the Atomic Energy Commission about her concerns and driving to meet with a New York Times journalist and an official of her union's national office, she died in a car crash under unclear circumstances. Life Born in Texas, she married William Meadows, an oil pipeline worker, with whom she had three children. Following the couple's bankruptcy due to Meadows' overspending, and in the face of Meadows' refusal to end an extramarital affair, Silkwood left Meadows in 1972 and moved to Oklahoma City, where she briefly worked as a hospital clerk. After being hired at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, in 1972, Silkwood joined the local Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union and took part in a strike at the plant. After the strike ended, she was elected to the union's bargaining committee, the first woman to achieve that position at the Kerr-McGee plant. She was assigned to investigate health and safety issues. She discovered what she believed to be numerous violations of health regulations, including exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment and improper storage of samples. Death Later that evening, Silkwood's body was found in her car, which had run off the road and struck a culvert on the east side of State Highway 74, 180 meters south of the intersection with West Industrial Road. The car contained none of the documents she held in the union meeting at the Hub cafe. She was pronounced dead at the scene in what was believed to be an accident. The trooper at the scene remembers that he found one or two tablets of the sedative methaqualone in the car, and he remembers finding cannabis. The police report indicated that she fell asleep at the wheel. Evidence for a Conspiracy Some pointers to a conspiracy around her death include: * Key documents related to her efforts to expose the health and safety violations were missing from the car. Multiple family members and friends confirmed she had the documents with her and took them in her car. The documents have never been found. * The coroner found 0.35 milligrams of methaqualone per 100 milliliters of blood at the time of her death — an amount almost twice the recommended dosage for inducing drowsiness. * Skid marks from Silkwood's car were present on the road, suggesting that she was trying to get back onto the road after being pushed from behind * Investigators also noted damage on the rear of Silkwood's vehicle that, according to Silkwood's friends and family, had not been present before the accident. As the crash was entirely a front-end collision, it did not explain the damage to the rear of her vehicle. * A microscopic examination of the rear of Silkwood's car showed paint chips that could have come only from a rear impact by another vehicle. Silkwood's family claimed to know of no accidents of any kind that Silkwood had had with the car, and that the 1974 Honda Civic she was driving was new when purchased and no insurance claims were filed on that vehicle. * According to her family, she had received several threatening phone calls very shortly before her death. * One of the investigators disappeared under "mysterious circumstances". * One of the witnesses committed suicide shortly before she was to testify against the Kerr-McGee Corporation about the alleged happenings at the plant * Silkwood family's legal team were followed, threatened with violence, and physically assaulted. However, if she was assassinated as part of a conspiracy. Her killers are not known, the nuclear plant and the CIA have been suggested, with one author alleging a secret underground plutonium-smuggling ring (explaining the 30kg in missing plutonium from the plant), in which many government agencies, including the highest levels of government and international intelligence agencies CIA, MI5, Israeli Mossad, and a "shadowy group of Iranians" were involved. See Also * Conspiracy Theory * Juanita Nielsen References The information in this article comes from the Wikipedia page on Karen Silkwood, the conspiracy evidence comes from the book The Killing of Karen Silkwood, The Story Behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case by Richard L. Rashke, (published in 2000). Category:Libertarian Socialist Wiki Category:Trade Unionists Category:USA Category:North America Category:1974 Category:Victims of Assassination Category:Conspiracy Theories